At Freddie's Read online

  Although Freddie usually began by saying something gracious, the caller’s first instinct was that of self-preservation, or even to make sure that the door, now to the rear, could be reached in a hurry. Yet in fact no one left before they had to. The margin between alarm and fascination was soon crossed. Partly it was her voice, a croak suggestive of long suffering, which adjusted itself little by little, as though any difficulties were worthwhile, to caressing flattery. This flattery usually saved Freddie money. – I hope you don’t mind the room being rather cold, I don’t notice it myself while I’m talking to you – knowing that this kind of thing could be seen through, but that in itself constituted a further flattery. Certainly she could create her own warmth, a glow like the very first effects of alcohol. As to what she wanted, no mystery was made. She wanted to get the advantage, but on the other hand human beings interested her so much that it must always be an advantage to meet another one. When she smiled there was a certain lopsidedness, the shade of a deformity, or, it could be, the aftermath of a slight stroke. Freddie never tried to conceal this – Take a good look – she advised her pupils – I’m not nearly so amusing as you’re going to be when you imitate me. – But the smile itself was priceless in its benevolence, and in its amusement that benevolence could still exist. One had to smile with her, perhaps regretting it later.

  Her shabbiness was a grossly unfair reproach. Her devotion to the things of the spirit was a menace. The trouble, of course, was that she never asked anything exactly for herself. Why, after all, had the Alexandra parted with so many lengths of rep and velvet? Why did the Royal Opera House, at every end-of-season auction, allow so much indulgence to bids from the Temple School? Why was Freddie represented – looking just the same, even with the same skirt and brooches – alongside of the Great Stars of All Time on the safety-curtain of the Palladium? Why, again, was Mattie allowed to go on working in Dombey & Son? Only because Freddie cared so much, and so relentlessly, for the theatre, where, beyond all other worlds, love given is love returned. Insane directors, perverted columnists cold as a fish, bankrupt promoters, players incapable from drink, have all forgiven each other and been forgiven, and will be, until the last theatre goes dark, because they loved the profession. And of Freddie – making a large assumption – they said: her heart is in it.

  She must have had origins. Even for Freddie there must have been some explanation. It was understood that she was born in 1890, and was a vicar’s daughter. Some periods of her life were not well explained. A fading photograph on the wall showed her in the streets of Manchester, apparently raising the banner of the Suffragette Movement. But who was the male figure to her right, in a half-threatening attitude, with his foot on the pedal of a tandem bicycle? Was it then, perhaps, that she had had her stroke? A later photograph, with Freddie in breeches and puttees, was much clearer. She was hoeing turnips to make into jam for the men in the trenches. Certainly she had left her job as a Land Girl in the following year, 1917, and come to London to join the staff of the Old Vic. That meant working for the formidable Lilian Baylis, who had taken over the place five years earlier as a temperance coffee house in a disreputable quarter, and had turned it into a Shakespearean theatre for the people. Miss Baylis declared that she was not educated and not a lady, and did only what God told her to. Her staff were warned that they would have no home life of any kind. Her audiences, broken in to the hard seats, were entirely loyal. Her theatre was so uncomfortable and so deeply loved that it was believed that the British public would never allow it to close. She was the Lady of the Vic, almost the only person of whom Freddie spoke with respect.

  It was from Lilian Baylis that she had studied the craft of idealism, that is to say, how to defeat materialism by getting people to work for almost nothing. At the Vic, indeed, the lower-paid actresses often had to take men’s parts, and were told that it would be good for them to put on beards and speak such lovely lines. Freddie did not copy these methods, rather she invented her own variations. In one way, however, she surpassed the Lady, who told her staff: ‘Come to me in your joys and come to me in your sorrows, but not in between, because I’ve not time for chit-chat.’ Freddie, on the other hand, was always ready to talk, and, in those days, to listen. By the end of the war she had come to know and be known by pretty well everyone in the London theatre.

  In 1924 she left the Old Vic, not at all on bad terms with Miss Baylis, but with a recognition that the two of them, compressed under one roof, might provide the conditions for an explosion. With a small legacy – but who was it from? – she opened the Temple School.

  A certain amount of her life, then, was accounted for. But there were conflicting elements. Her assistant, Miss Hilary Blewett, had been favoured with darker glimpses, Freddie having told her more than once that she had known the very worst of poverty. That was either in Peterborough or St Petersburg, Miss Blewett hadn’t quite been able to make out which. The Bluebell was, by the way, quite capable of disbelief. Her devotion to Freddie, necessitating very long hours, was difficult to explain, even to herself. She was, perhaps, under some form of mild hypnosis.

  Freddie’s name was Wentworth, but she scarcely ever referred to her relations. There were no photographs of them. Her younger brother, however, who was a reputable solicitor on the south coast, had been known to call, though only once, at the Temple. Worried about his sister’s finances, or what he guessed of them (not having seen her for many years), he sent her a carefully composed letter. Freddie told him that she had been too busy to read more than the first sentence.

  ‘I imagine I am as busy as you, Frieda, and to considerably more profit.’

  He was sitting awkwardly in a small armchair, not at all right for a solicitor.

  ‘I have to conserve my energy, dear. I manage that by never doing anything that isn’t strictly necessary, and above all by never reading anything I don’t have to. I knew you’d tell me what was in your letter.’

  ‘Look, Frieda, I’ve been trying to think back to the time before this atmosphere of craze, I scarcely know what to call it, anyway this involvement with the theatre, began. Of course, I’m considerably younger than you are, I always have been. But I’d like to know how it was that you became so set on running this school, which I’m afraid is leaving you in a very discouraging financial position … I’m simply asking you to take stock of your position, Frieda.’

  ‘Well, it was good of you to come, James, and I’m interested you should have thought it worthwhile to do so. I think it will make you feel better. Why, this very evening, when you talk things over with your wife – what is her name, by the way?’

  ‘Cherry,’ the solicitor replied.

  ‘But that was your first wife’s name.’

  ‘I have only been married once, Frieda.’

  ‘When you tell her that this place appeared not to have been dusted for God knows how long, and that I couldn’t even find your letter, and what an old wreck I looked, and so forth, well then you’ll be able to tell each other at regular intervals how good it was of you to come.’

  ‘Cherry and I would like you to come and have dinner with us,’ he persisted.

  ‘You’d like to feel that I’ve had dinner with you, perhaps. But I’ve reached a point in my life where I never go out in the evenings. You’ve nothing to reproach yourself with on that score.’

  She remained calm, with an imposing appearance of sanity. But that wouldn’t do, all the common sense was on his side, as the frayed furniture bore witness. From notes which he had made he began to read an analysis – simply a rough guess, since she hadn’t seen fit to confide in him – of the school’s finances at the present time; he’d just asked around and had been told that there weren’t more than forty pupils, if that, and there was a dangerous dependence on Peter Pan and the Christmas shows for employment, with the odd musical and the few Shakespearean parts. No TV work, no film work, no modelling, the Temple didn’t countenance any of them. – A luminous smile passed over Freddie’s face, as thoug
h the depths stirred. – He persevered, asking how long it was since she had had the place surveyed or inspected in any way. Freddie replied that a Ministry of Education inspector was due in a few weeks’ time. When the solicitor brightened she added that she hoped the Ministry wouldn’t send anybody too heavy as she was doubtful about the sagging floor of the upstairs hall, and had given the children instructions never to walk straight across it, but to skirt round the edge of the boards. His sharp glance, rather like hers at that moment, told her that she was exaggerating. Probably she was trying to amuse him. As it happened, he was quite wrong. If his ears had been a little keener he could have heard the alternate shuffling and pattering above their heads. But he was a man who kept his eye on things, rather than listening to them. He said that he was obliged to be going, for, as a busy man, a necessary condition of his being anywhere was to be on the way somewhere else. He picked up his coat and brief-case, and then, although he knew that he had brought nothing else with him, looked round, as though he were not quite sure.

  ‘I don’t like to leave you like this, Frieda.’

  ‘You’ll find me looking exactly the same next time you come.’

  ‘That’s what I’m afraid of. I don’t find the idea at all reassuring.’ As he continued the moves of departure, Freddie, who had never stirred from her chair, pointed to a bureau which stood sideways on, struggling for position between two larger chests of drawers.

  ‘Help yourself out of the left hand small top drawer, James. That’s where I keep the complimentary tickets, I’ve forgotten what’s there.’

  ‘Well, if they’re going to waste … I’ve no objection to a good show … there’s a glass of milk here which seems to have been there for some time,’ he added as he opened the bureau. But he could not regain the upper hand.

  ‘You’ll find some passes for the Palladium, dear. Tell Cherry they’re good for any night.’

  He put them carefully away into a compartment of his notecase. As he got into his car he felt a sense of injustice at not being able to dislike his sister more, for surely she was not likeable. The smile she had given him at the last minute was probably responsible.

  This method of dealing with her relative, or relatives, left Freddie at liberty to elaborate the story of her life pretty much as she wanted. She was not likely to be challenged. To take one more example: could it be true that at one time she had been on the stage herself? When she rose from her chair her bulk was supported by the unmistakable, not very graceful, walk of a dancer, the upper part of the body quite still, the feet planted flat, like a sea creature on dry land. It was startling to see her glide forward like that. She enjoyed the surprise it caused.

  2

  WHEN Mattie looked into the school on his way home from the Alexandra, Freddie was sitting with Miss Blewett and Unwin, the embittered accountant. Mattie poked his head round the office door, with all the bright airs of the indulged.

  ‘Go away, Mattie,’ said Freddie.

  Still in make-up, his skin like a kid glove, his eyes lined and ringed with black, the child clung to the door-handle, his voice broken with sobs.

  ‘You saved me, Miss Wentworth … I’d be out of work, I’d never get work again, if you hadn’t spoken to Mr Lightfoot … I owe everything to you …’

  Freddie paid no attention whatsoever.

  ‘God who created me,’ Mattie went on in a thrilling contralto, ‘Nimble and light of limb In three elements free To run to ride to swim Not when the senses dim But from the heart of joy I would remember Him Take the thanks of a boy.’

  ‘I’m deducting thirty per cent this week for damage and nuisance,’ Freddie remarked. Mattie, with an expression of deep malignance, departed.

  ‘He’s acting,’ said Miss Blewett.

  ‘Worse than that,’ said Freddie. ‘He’s acting being a child actor.’ But both of them knew that the children came off stage in a state of pitiful and vibrant excitement that must be allowed to spend its impulse gradually into quiet. Told again and again to take off his make-up in the theatre, Mattie always slipped away and displayed his painted face in the Underground, taking pride and feverish pleasure in the passengers’ disapproval. To be glanced at from behind newspapers delighted him. The ambition of all children is to have their games taken seriously. Dodging round Covent Garden and up Floral Street with his reddened lips and doe’s eyes, he knew very well what kind of strangers were following him, slowed down to let them catch up, then shook them off just as he turned the corner to the school.

  ‘Is he a genius?’ the accountant asked.

  ‘I’ve got one great talent in the school at the moment, but it’s not Matthew Stewart. Mattie is something else. He’s a success.’ Unwin had become preternaturally sensitive to openings – the word ‘success’ was one – which might help him to lead the conversation back to the subject of the accounts. He would have liked to assert himself, and sometimes thought that unless some drastic step was taken he might lose his reason. The Bluebell sometimes took his part, but was an uncertain ally. His scheme was to introduce into the place a third party who would be prepared to invest a bit of money, and to talk rationally. That should not be impossible, because it was his opinion that Freddie, though unanswerable and seemingly immovable, did in fact modify her behaviour a little in the presence of a good-looking man. Unwin’s father had acted as the accountant here in the thirties, and about his relationship with Freddie there had always been speculation. Always, therefore, Unwin kept his eyes open for a saviour with, let’s say, fifteen thousand in hand, and the high courage necessary to make himself acceptable and turn Freddie into a going concern. Even for her there must soon be a limit to borrowing, demanding, and begging.

  On the wall above her head there was fixed a piece of painted canvas which Unwin did his best not to look at. The words upon it, written in foot-high letters and scrolled with gilt, read NAUGHT SHALL MAKE US RUE IF ENGLAND? ITSELF DO REST BUT TRUE. They were the closing lines of King John and the canvas had hung above the proscenium of the Old Vic for the production of 1917. Lilian Baylis had refused to take it down until the Kaiser had admitted defeat; it had been given to Freddie, as a significant parting present, when she left to open her school. In 1940 the Bluebell had suggested touching the whole thing up and brightening it a bit, so that they could hang it out of the window if Hitler’s tanks came rolling up Floral Street. Freddie refused; an unnecessary expense, it would last for at least one more war just as it was.

  The words were arranged in a half circle on a blue background, as though soaring through the clouds. Freddie herself never turned her head to look at them, she relied on their effect upon others. And even though he avoided reading them so often, Unwin couldn’t get away from them. They were a reproach to reason.

  He spoke now of the many new stage schools, mostly concentrating on pupils with freckles and missing front teeth, which were then considered necessary for film and television work, and the ease with which these pupils seemed to get county grants for their education.

  ‘No one takes me to the cinema any more,’ said Freddie, ‘and the school can’t afford a television set.’

  ‘You’ve probably hardly noticed all these new establishments. And of course I don’t mean that you wish them any harm.’

  ‘I do wish them some harm.’

  She must have been listening more closely than he’d thought.

  ‘You can run along now, dear,’ she added. ‘I’m going to sit here alone by the gas-fire a while. I’m in need of a bit of guidance. A Word may come to me.’

  Her reference, from time to time, to this Word was the most unfair of all Freddie’s tactics, since it was quite out of step with her general shrewdness. It was a mystery, but not a spiritual one. In the stuffy darkness, in the silence, a chance phrase, usually from something she had read or someone she had talked to recently, would come back to her and strike her with the authentic note. Then, lapped in her armchair, she smiled. The Word was taken to indicate the way through her next difficul
ty.

  It could manifest itself, however, outside the premises. Twice, it appeared, a man with a pale face and a black hat, a different hat, but black on both occasions, had come up to her in the crowded street and said quietly: ‘They depend on you.’ Or the Word might take the form of a peculiarly trivial inscription – OPEN OTHER WAY UP had served its turn – and there had even been some from Miss Blewett’s passing remarks – we can’t do more than we can, we all live under the same sky. This last had given Freddie guidance not to repair the roof, which was gaping wide in several places, until next year.

  Possibly it was one of these moments of inspiration which had led her to realise that the Temple could be run, on its educational side, with only two teachers, obtained at the very cheapest rate. About this, for once, the accountant and the Word had agreed. It would allow a larger allocation for the fencing instructor, the accent and dialect expert, the Shakespeare coach and for half-crazy old Ernest Valentine who only came in to do Peter Pan. Having made a clean sweep, then, at the end of the previous summer, Freddie had managed to acquire two new teachers, recent arrivals from Northern Ireland, who might be expected not to have found their feet yet.

  Hannah Graves was a nice-looking girl of twenty, with too much sense, one would have thought, to consider a job at eleven pounds fifteen shillings a week. But Freddie had instantly divined in her that attraction to the theatre, and indeed to everything theatrical, which can persist in the most hard-headed, opening the way to poetry and disaster. Hannah had no stage ambitions; backstage was the enchantment. Once sure of this, Freddie attacked on another front. Some of the pupils, she pointed out, were little better than waifs, needing only kindness and a firm hand. Of course, the job wasn’t an easy one. While the children were working, someone from the school had to go down to the theatres and see that they were getting the amount of education the law demanded.